The Aborigines’ Protection Society as an Anticolonial Network: Rethinking the APS “from the bottom up” through letters written by Black South Africans, 1883–87 Darren Reid University College London Abstract Histories of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) often take for granted that the APS was principally a metropolitan organization, existing primarily in the minds and actions of its members in London. This paper presents a new perspective, highlighting that the APS also existed in the minds and the actions of its global network of settler, missionary, traveller and Indigenous correspondents that provided the APS with information on the conditions of the imperial peripheries. Case studies of letters written by three Black South Africans—John Tengo Jabavu, Mqikela, and Samuel Moroka— to the APS between 1883 and 1887 are examined. Jabavu wrote from Cape Town, challenging Cape encroachments on African voting rights. Mqikela wrote from Pondoland, challenging Cape encroachments on mPondo territory. Samuel Moroka wrote while visiting London, challenging Orange Free State interference in his succession dispute in Thaba Nchu. Placing these letters within a framework of epistolary mobility, this paper demonstrates how the correspondents used writing to the APS as a tool of anticolonial resistance. More than simply “attempting” resistance, Jabavu, Mqikela, and Samuel Moroka occasionally succeeded in their attempts, convincing the APS to raise their questions in the House of Commons, set up interviews between them and Members of Parliament, and publish their articles in daily newspapers. Yet these successes were always conditioned by an unequal balance of power. The APS could censor and control the voices of Jabavu, Mqikela, and Samuel Moroka when assisting them was no longer in the APS’s interest. Approaching the APS from the perspectives of Black South African correspondents offers a new perspective not only on the APS as an anticolonial network, but also on colony- metropole relationships in late nineteenth-century South Africa. 0 The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) occupies a somewhat paradoxical place in the historiography of the British Empire. The name is inescapable, especially as regards South Africa. It has a strong tendency to appear in histories of any South African event that took place between John Philips’ agitation against Khoikhoi exploitation in 1828 to the Zulu Rebellion in 1906. Indeed, it is difficult to find a collection of UK parliamentary papers dealing with nineteenth-century South African affairs that does not include a reference to the APS. On the other hand, despite its apparent omnipresence, the Aborigines’ Protection Society is most commonly discussed using a discourse of failure. As Zoe Laidlaw eloquently summarizes: By almost all standards, the APS can only be judged a failure. Conditions for indigenous peoples around the empire did not improve as the Society’s founders had hoped; and their calls for positive imperial intervention fell on increasingly deaf ears as the settler colonies of British North America, Australasia and southern Africa gained control over their internal affairs.1 While failure is certainly a valid framing of the APS, it is also metropole-centric. It is a framing which privileges the intentions and agendas of APS members in London, in which “success” and “failure” are judged according to the attainment of metropolitan objectives. To be fair, the APS technically was a metropolitan organization. In the period under study (1883–87) it operated out of 17 King William Street, less than an hour’s walk from the Colonial Office headquarters in Whitehall. It revolved primarily around its secretary, Frederick Chesson, as well as a small committee of London-based politicians and philanthropists such as Robert Fowler (Lord Mayor, 1883 and 1885) and William McArthur (Lord Mayor, 1880). But what of the other people whose agency became entangled with the APS: those empire-wide correspondents who engaged with the APS according to their own diverse interests? The Society’s correspondence collection at the Bodleian Libraries contains 9,605 individual letters sent to the APS between 1837 and 1909. Most of these letters are from 1866–88, and thus form the temporal framework of this paper.2 Roughly 1,400 of these letters are from South Africa, written by around 150 individual correspondents.3 Was the APS a failure in the eyes of these correspondents? Why did they expend 1,400 letters worth of ink, paper, 1 postage and time in the pursuance of this correspondence, and what does a focus on their correspondence reveal of the APS and of South African experiences of empire? For one thing, focusing on these correspondents challenges the commonplace notion that the APS was primarily aligned with missionaries and biased against settlers.4 In the South African context, the APS is most frequently associated with missionaries like John Philip, Robert Moffat, the Colenso family, John Mackenzie, Eugene Casalis and so on. Simultaneously, the APS is treated as having inherited the 1837 Select Committee on Aborigines’ distain for settlers, and to view them as “brutish and acquisitive” ruffians that needed stiff imperial control.5 These notions are a fair representation of how the APS members in London understood themselves, but the correspondence reveals that settlers wrote to the APS just as much as missionaries did. Missionaries certainly corresponded for longer and so leave a bigger relative imprint in the archive (the Colenso family alone accounts for more than 300 of those 1,400 letters), yet the breadth of settler correspondence is nonetheless staggering and accounts for around 600 of the 1,400 letters. Some settlers disagreed with the APS and wrote to defend their oppressive treatment of Africans. For instance, one Natal farmer named S.E. Atkinson wrote to the APS on 5 April 1876: If you had been like myself upwards of a quarter of a century in this country as an employer of Kafirs and engaged amongst them you would know from experience they could not be governed as men…. I regret to say as far as the Kafirs in Natal are concerned, at the present day they are far greater rogues liars thieves… upon an average they are paid 4 times more wages a month than for which they do about half the work.6 For the most part, however, settler correspondents exhibited no difficulty in perceiving their interests as in alignment with those of the APS, and the abundance of their letters certainly calls for a reconsideration of the APS’s relationship with settler society. This paper, however, is focused on African letters to the APS, a focus which reveals a presence of African voices which has hitherto been unaddressed within the historiography. These African voices are few and far between—only 37 letters from six correspondents between 1866 and 1888—yet they are no less important for their scarcity. Even more than approaching the APS through the lens of settler letters, 2 revisiting the APS through the eyes of its African correspondents reveals an entirely new perspective of the organization. I argue that by looking at the Aborigines’ Protection Society from the perspective of its African correspondents, we can perceive it not just as the pro-imperial humanitarian society that its metropolitan members knew it as, but also as the anticolonial network that these correspondents perceived it to be. This paper demonstrates that Africans took advantage of the epistolic space afforded them by the APS to challenge the effects of British colonialism in their territories. I present the letters of three correspondents—John Tengo Jabavu of the Cape Colony, Samuel Moroka of Thaba Nchu, and Mqikela of Pondoland—as case studies.7 These cases were chosen based on their sustained correspondence: each wrote upon at least four separate occasions. Two of the other African correspondents—Pambani Mzimba and Kamaherero—wrote only one or two letters which are difficult to extract broader themes from. The sixth correspondent, Shadrach Boyce Mama, also wrote only one letter, and I have written about him elsewhere.8 Each of the three correspondents covered in this paper came from a different background, wrote for their own reasons and encountered different responses from the APS. And as I will show, each discovered the APS to be a viable, albeit fickle and uncontrollable, medium for intervening in metropolitan imperial politics from the edges of the empire. There are some limitations to this paper which should be borne in mind. It is important to note that while the APS was in operation from 1837 untl 1909, each of the letters under discussion was written in the 1880s. My focus on this one decade is partially methodological: the research behind this paper is based on a reading of the 1866–88 letters, and so any arguments put forward should not be generalized beyond the 1860s–1880s. More research into letters from other periods may produce more generalizable results. That said, I focus on the 1880s rather than the 1860s and 1870s because no letter from an African correspondent appears until 1879, and so there does appear to be an aspect of African epistolary engagement with the APS that is specific to the 1880s. This may be related to the temporal specificity that has been identified with the rise of African political organizations in the 1880s, linked to the proliferation of mission schools in the Cape. While mission schools had been a part of the Cape landscape since the eighteenth century, they started to become more accessible and more common from 1854, when the Cape began supplying public funding for mission schools in the eastern territories. The number of elementary- and secondary-schooled 3 Africans in the Cape rose from around 9,000 in 1850 to around 100,000 by the end of the century.9 When faced with the mass dispossession of the mineral revolution period (1870s–1890s), these mission-educated Africans responded using the Western tools of protest that they had been exposed to at school, forging the first Black political associations: the Native Educational Association in 1879, the Imbumba Yama Nyman in 1882, and the Thembu Association and the South African Native Congress in 1884.